Review: The Anatomy of Fascism

The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[I read the Audible.com edition.]

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites.72 Whereas citizens in a parliamentary democracy voted to choose a few fellow citizens to serve as their representatives, fascists expressed their citizenship directly by participating in ceremonies of mass assent. The propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated issues among a small group of legislators who (according to liberal ideals) were supposed to be better informed than the mass of the citizenry. Fascism could well seem to offer to the opponents of the Left efficacious new techniques for controlling, managing, and channeling the “nationalization of the masses," at a moment when the Left threatened to enlist a majority of the population around two nonnational poles: class and international pacifism.
One may also perceive the crisis of liberalism after 1918 in a second way, as a “crisis of transition," a rough passage along the journey into industrialization and modernity. It seems clear that nations that industrialized late faced more social strains than did Britain, the first to industrialize. For one thing, the pace was faster for the latecomers; for another, labor was by then much more powerfully organized. One does not have to be a Marxist to perceive the crisis of the liberal state in terms of a stressful transition to industrialization, unless one injects inevitability into the explanatory model. Marxists, until fairly recently, saw this crisis as an ineluctable stage in capitalist development, where the economic system can no longer function without reinforced discipline of the working class and/or a forceful conquest of external resources and markets. One can argue, much less sweepingly, that the latecomers simply faced higher levels of social turmoil which required new forms of control.
A third way of looking at the crisis of the liberal state envisions the same problem of late industrialization in social terms. Certain liberal states, according to this version, were unable to deal with either the “nationalization of the masses" or the “transition to industrial society" because their social structure was too heterogeneous, divided between pre-industrial groups that had not yet disappeared—artisans, great landowners, rentiers—alongside new industrial managerial and working classes. Where the pre-industrial middle class was particularly powerful, according to this reading of the crisis of the liberal state, it could block peaceful settlement of industrial issues, and could provide manpower to fascism in order to save the privileges and prestige of the old social order.73
Yet another “take" on the crisis of the liberal order focuses on stressful transitions to modernity in cultural terms. According to this reading, universal literacy, cheap mass media, and invasive alien cultures (from within as well as from without) made it harder as the twentieth century opened for the liberal intelligentsia to perpetuate the traditional intellectual and cultural order.74 Fascism offered the defenders of a cultural canon new propaganda skills along with a new shamelessness about using them.
It may not be absolutely necessary to choose only one among these various diagnoses of the difficulties faced by the liberal regimes of Europe after the end of World War I. Italy and Germany do indeed seem to fit all four. They were among the last major states in Europe to learn to live with a mass electorate: Italy in 1912, Germany only fully in 1919. Russia, another newcomer to mass politics, fell to the Left as befitted an even less developed society where even the middle class was not yet fully enfranchised. Industrially, Italy, as “the least of the Great Powers,"75 had been engaged in an energetic catching-up sprint since the 1890s. Germany, to be sure, was already a highly industrial nation in 1914, but it had been the last of the Great Powers to industrialize, after the 1860s, and then, after the defeat of 1918, desperately needed repair and reconstruction. In social structure, both Italy and Germany contained large pre-industrial sectors (though so did France and even England).76 Cultural conservatives in both countries felt intensely threatened by artistic experiment and popular culture; Weimar Germany was indeed at the very epicenter of postwar cultural experimentalism.77
One needs to interject a warning at this point against inevitability. Identifying the crisis of liberal regimes as crucial to the success of fascism suggests that some kind of environmental determinism is at work. If the setting is conducive, according to this way of thinking, one gets fascism. I prefer to leave space for national differences and for human choices in our explanation.

....

At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf." The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both.
Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation.84 It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists" who deserved it.85
Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice," according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, front-soldiers," and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another." Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’ "86 The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.

Like The Mass Psychology of Fascism mystic

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity.71 The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

...

...fascist leaders enjoyed a kind of supremacy that was not quite like leadership in other kinds of regime. The Führer and the Duce could claim legitimacy neither by election nor conquest. It rested on charisma,42 a mysterious direct communication with the Volk or razza that needs no mediation by priests or party chieftains. Their charisma resembled media-era celebrity “stardom," raised to a higher power by its say over war and death. It rested on a claim to a unique and mystical status as the incarnation of the people’s will and the bearer of the people’s destiny. A whiff of charisma is not unknown among traditional dictators, of course, and even some democratically elected leaders, such as Churchill, de Gaulle, and the two Roosevelts, had it. Stalin surely had charisma, as the public hysteria at his funeral showed. But Stalin shared his role as the bearer of historical destiny with the Communist Party, which made succession possible even if palace intrigues and murders multiplied before the successor could emerge. But fascist rule is more nakedly dependent on charisma than any other kind, which may help explain why no fascist regime has so far managed to pass power to a successor. Both Hitler and Mussolini had charisma, though Mussolini’s declining vitality in middle age and his tawdry end made most people forget the magnetism he had once exerted, even outside Italy.

Charisma helps us understand several curious features of fascist leadership. The notorious indolence of Hitler, far from making Nazism more tepid, freed his subordinates to compete in driving the regime toward ever more extreme radicalization. A charismatic leader is also immune from the surprisingly widespread grumbling against the administration that quickly arose in both Germany and Italy. At the same time, charismatic leadership is brittle. It promises to the Volk or the razza, as Adrian Lyttelton once noted, “a privileged relation with history."47 Having raised expectations so high, a fascist leader unable to deliver the promised triumphs risks losing his magic...



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